


Run Over With Mercy

by jax (hippydeath)



Category: The Listener (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hippydeath/pseuds/jax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We pick up, we move on, and we trust our friends are there to pick us up when we fall.</p><p>Post 3.10</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run Over With Mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sprl1199](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprl1199/gifts).



They give him a couple of weeks, take your time, they tell him, full pay, don’t worry about a thing. They smile and sympathise and he knows it’s all genuine, knows they mean it all. It’s like they forget though, that he can read what they’re thinking, that as he grabs his coat and his helmet from his desk, he can hear the undercurrent of _first real casualty/makes or breaks him/wasn’t even one of our cases_. There are other things he picks up, like Klein’s constant scepticism, Michelle’s worry, Dev wondering if he should do the bro thing; he’d laugh at the last but the adrenaline and stress are finally wearing off, leaving the numbness and the brutality of “she’s never coming back” pounding at the front of his skull.  
He makes it out the building and to his bike and just rides for an hour or so, ignoring the snow and grit covering his legs.  
He makes it back to his apartment in the dark, shedding cold and damp clothes as he heads for the shower, ramping up the temperature for as long as he can stand it. He revels in the physicality, and freedom from the mind, if only for a few minutes. He scrubs away the feeling of the hazmat suits, the sweat of the chase across the city for Karl’s girlfriend, the grime of his aimless ride. He stays under the spray for as long as he can bear it, trying to wash away the numbness that’s creeping in. It’s superficial right now; the real grief hasn’t kicked in yet, that will take days, he knows, to really manifest.

His camera is still on the coffee table where he dropped it earlier, the silly photos of him and Liv the first things that come up when he turns it on. In some ways he’s glad that those are the last real memories he has of her, rather than the snippets he got from Oz and Sandy. He’s not sure that he could reconcile the Liv that he knew with the woman dying in a quarantine ward.

Oz is there at some point after he’s done with the shower, a bottle of beer opened and handed to him, and they spend the evening not talking about anything in particular. Oz knows him well enough that Toby will talk when he wants to. It probably would have become an evening routine, at least for a few days while Oz is on a day shift, but the second evening, Sandy joins him one evening and they talk about the hospital, how things are since the outbreak, and somehow, not really surprisingly, that segues into Liv. And then everything grinds to a halt.  
They sit in awkward silence for a few minutes. Awkward, at least for Oz and Sandy, while Toby listens to the litany of swearing and worrying from the two of them.  
“I’m beat guys,” he says after the silence has drawn on too long, standing up and starting to collect up the bottles, heading for the kitchen to dump them until he can be bothered to take them and the rest of the trash out. “I think I’m going to turn in.”  
Footsteps are fading away, Sandy’s, he thinks, which means that Oz is about to give him one of his uplifting talks. He’s not in the mood, and turns round to say so.  
“I’m not,” he starts, but Oz holds out his hands.  
“I’m just going to say that there are shifts going if you want them,” then he leaves, following Sandy back to his own place, and leaving Toby, feeling like an ass, stood in the middle of his apartment.

After a couple of days the boredom and the space alone in his own head is finally too much to take and he heads to the depot and takes up Ryder on the offer of the shifts. Ryder doesn't ask questions beyond making sure Toby thinks he’s fit for work, and he panders in the way that he always does; with brusqueness and sharp words, but it’s safe and familiar and while everything reminds him of Liv and the fact that he wasn't there when she died, it’s comforting. He's not alone in his own head, mulling thoughts round and round, and even though he doesn't have to read to hear what people are thinking about him, that’s almost reassuring.  
Michelle and Dev would be quiet and keeping it all in their heads, because that’s who they are and what they do. Here, he's with people who cope more like he does. They remember the good times and they show what they feel. There are flowers on the front desk and a board with pictures and notes. People are still raw and they're still showing it. Some of them are less than complementary about him being there pretender he hears a couple of times, _above us/not worth his time/should have run back to his cop friends_ , but he keeps his focus, knows his job and finds comfort in the familiarity of pulling on the uniform and tearing through the city. 

It’s an early shift and so far all is quiet, no pile ups, no fires, and after a couple of slips and sprains, he and Oz track down breakfast at an old haunt.  
"You gonna be at the funeral?" Oz asks round a mouthful of breakfast burrito, because that’s just the sort of person he is.  
Toby shakes his head, "Her parents want it family only. There'll be a memorial service though, for everyone else."  
"Yeah?"  
"Yeah, they're pretty private. And they're pretty shaken up. Doesn’t help that the... She... Her..." Toby takes a deep breath, "That her body hasn't been released yet. It still hasn't been cleared." Oz looks crestfallen at that.  
"Seriously? You'd have thought they would have made it a priority."  
"They had to make sure that they had all the evidence they needed..."  
"So when is the memorial going to be?" oz asks, heading off Toby getting caught up in procedure, in the things he should have done, could have done.  
“Hopefully in a week. They said they'd let me know, and I guess they'll let the hospital know so people can go." "Yeah..."  
Toby picks up the start of another question from Oz, but the radio saves him, calling them across the city to a fall and possible fracture, and they head off in companionable silence.

Mrs Buckley is the sort of old lady that Toby knows to be afraid of; all coquettish smiles and apologies, but they’re the ones that you have to watch out for. The ones who’ll grab your ass and call you sweetheart in a tone of voice that is quite frankly, terrifying. He lets Oz bear the brunt of her, radioing the call in to the hospital and giving them an estimated arrival as, yeah, she grabs Oz’s backside as he leans over for something on the other side of the rig. He holds back a laugh and lets Oz bluster through it as he navigates the mid morning roads.  
Back in the hospital, it’s weird. He hadn’t avoided it up until this point, but there had been little reason, apart from that morning, for him to be in there. Oz had volunteered to take Mrs Buckley in on his own, save him from even more comments, but Toby had shaken his head.  
“It’s not like I have to listen to everything they’re saying.” He reminds Oz as they wheel Mrs Buckley in.  
Her ears perk up at the thought of gossip, and he gets a flash of a young woman with the same clever brown eyes, a little older than he is, “Bad break up dear?” she asks, oh so innocently, and if he hadn’t seen what was in her mind, he might have been offended at her intrusion, but instead he just shakes his head.  
“A friend who worked here died recently,” he says honestly, because the strain is all over the department, so she might as well hear it before she heads in.  
She pats his hand and offers her condolences, the image of the woman still in her mind, and over her head he gives Oz a knowing smile.

For a few hours at least, it’s normal. Back to how things were just a week ago. Their shift ends and they clean out the rig, taking their time and talking about nothing in particular.  
“Stop walking on eggshells round me man,” Toby says eventually, after he picks up the third or fourth aborted query of _you alright_ from Oz.  
 _Shit_. “Shit, sorry man. I wasn’t trying to.” Oz tosses him a pack of gauze pads. “I just don’t know what to say. You actually spoken to anyone? I know the hospital is laying on counselling for anyone who was inside, if you want them.”  
“I’m good, thanks. The IIB’s got the same, I just, you know, don’t really know what to say.” By this point they’re both sat on the steps of the rig, “I could have saved more people if I’d been around, been able to get into Karl’s head sooner?”  
Oz laughs, “Yeah, I see that going down a treat.”  
“Yeah.”  
“Hey,” Oz taps him on the shoulder, “What’re you going to do if the headaches start up again? If you need scanning or anything?”  
“Not sure,” Toby admits. “I’ve got copies of everything. Klein could probably hook me up with someone through IIB if needed I guess.”  
“Sure?” Oz asks, and Toby nods.

“Hey Liv,” he rattles off, not looking at the caller ID on the phone, not thinking. There’s only silence on the other end of the line though, and that’s when it really, finally, hits him. “Hello?” he asks down the line, but there’s no response, and after a couple of seconds, the line clicks with a disconnect.  
He sits on the couch, staring at his phone. He’s half ready for the memorial, trousers and undershirt on, shirt hanging off one arm.  
In the end that’s how Oz finds him when he knocks on the door to remind Toby that they’re going to be late if they don’t get a move on.  
“You don’t have to go,” Oz reminds him, when he’s shaken himself out of his torpor and finished getting dressed. “No one’s going to think any less of you. Well, someone might, but…”  
“No, I need to.” He insists, and he can feel the dubious look that Oz is holding back. “Liv would be there for me, if it were the other way round.”  
“Oh, hey, no.” Oz blurts.  
Toby can hear the muttering in Oz’s head but its not something that he’s going to focus on, just lets it wash over him as a comfort, even though it’s Oz worrying as usual.  
“I’m not.” Because he knows Oz knows that Toby knows what he’s thinking, “But I’m going. Just give me a minute.”  
Oz nods and waits while Toby finishes getting himself together. "Who was it on the phone?" He asks.  
"No idea. Just dead air, probably just a wrong number or something."  
They both leave it at that, Oz hustling Toby out the door and down to his car where Sandy’s waiting for them both. She gives Oz a querying look but nothing more. None of them are really up to prying too deeply right now.

The memorial was, it was nice. It was very Liv; people from work chatting casually, Toby, Oz and Sandy all wearing terrible shirts to match the ones that he and Liv had been wearing the morning she died. There was a massive book full of pictures and memories and it was as relaxed as something like that was probably ever going to be.  
Michelle and Dev are there, on the sidelines, making polite conversation and trying not to stand out too badly.  
Toby’s spoken to Michelle a couple of times since it happened, but only ever over the phone and new he wishes she was still on the other end of the phone; the worry and guilt had obviously been building and it was rolling off her in palpable waves.  
Eventually Dev takes a call and leaves, and Toby realises he can’t actually avoid Michelle for the rest of the wake.  
“Hey,” she waves at him as he approaches, and he knows that the painful grimacing smile on her face is mirrored on his.  
“Could you, I dunno, try and calm down a little, you’re kind of making my head want to explode.” He tries to smile, but what he says automatically makes him think of Liv and the worry that she always showed.  
“Sorry, sorry,” she pushes a hand through her hair. “This is really nice, the service was really, yeah. It seems like everyone really loved her.”  
“Yeah, yeah she was pretty popular.” Toby avoids looking at her, mostly so he can’t hear whatever it is she’s thinking. He’s too raw to completely stop the dribs and drabs coming through right now, and he wants to respect her wishes.  
They stand for a few minutes in silence, “You working on anything at the moment?” he asks.  
She shakes her head, “Tying up loose ends on a few cases, working on background for a couple of long hauls, nothing thrilling, nothing we need you for,” she tries to assure him. “You getting on alright?”  
“Yeah,” he starts, and then she looks at him, and he feels the weight of Oz’s stare as well, “I have no idea,” he finally admits, honesty suddenly overtaking sense. “I keep thinking I am, and then suddenly, not.”  
She nods, and even without reading her, he knows that she’s been through this, she’s talked about it, vaguely in the past.  
“You think you’re going to be ready to come back?” She asks.  
“Yeah. I’m better when I don’t have time to think, you know?”  
“Yeah,” she agrees, _just don’t let it always be like that_ , he can’t help but pick up from her.  
“Give me a call if you need me,” he says, patting her arm, “otherwise I’ll see you next Monday.”  
“Sure,” she looks like she’s going for her phone, probably summoned away by Klein as well, “Take care of yourself Toby.”  
“I will,” he promises, heading back to Oz, stopping to speak to a few people he barely knows as he crosses the room.  
“You good?” Oz asks.  
“Yeah,” Toby assures him, “and really, stop asking.”  
Oz shrugs. “Sorry man, just making sure Michelle isn’t trying to slave drive you back to IIB or anything.”  
They’re both smirking, “Nahh, it’s all good.” Toby assures him.  
“Sure?”  
“Sure.” Toby smiles, and Oz slaps him on the back.  
Sandy heads back over to them and claps them both on the shoulders, “You want to stay to the end, or are you gonna head out early?”  
“I think I’m going to stay,” Toby says, “You guys head home.” He smiles and looks round the room, just in time to catch a glimpse of Michelle heading back in, and just in time to get a rush of _missing, hours, repeat pattern_ as she shouts across the room.  
“Toby!” he winces and looks at Oz and Sandy.  
“Go, save the world.” Oz says with a grin, “it’s what she would have wanted.”


End file.
